The title of this category is shamelessly stolen from Sam Hard of Hard Up Garage.
I regret nothing.
Surprise, she's off the road again due to another issue that surfaced yesterday. More on this soon.
Yesterday, I did not like cars. Then I get a delivery from Driftworks and they put a sweet into my package, and now I like cars again.
These are 5mm wheel spacers. I'm hoping they will make the car sit a little nicer once the new suspension is fitted.
Onwards!
So, that was expensive, but what can you do. (Other than not owning old shit that is nigh-on impossible to get parts for. I should have thought about that five years ago!)
My car is running a fairly horrible mongrel suspension setup. Shortly after she came off the road in 2007, she gained some custom-made rear shocks from Gaz, as part of my brother's work to get her road-legal after her last MOT failure. These were, and still are, very nice; as good as you would expect from tailor-made stuff by Gaz. They're still on springs of unknown provenance and unknown age, which I intended to replace at some point.
The front ones, on the other hand, are awful; they look like budget coilovers from a completely different car (quite possibly a Mark 2 VW Golf) that were bodged to fit. In other words, they were shit coilovers, that are now old and shit coilovers that feel terrible. They also sit far too low. Weird, I know, someone with a modified Japanese car saying such a thing; except I actually like driving my car on the road, and me driving anywhere means driving some distance on Norfolk back-roads. As much as I like "the lows", I like not having a smashed sump even more.
As you may have guessed, with the GTX being a very rare car and the suspension being specific to the GTX, I do not have many off-the-shelf suspension options; there are only K-Sport and D2 coilovers available for it.[1] Bear in mind that the UK market for any 323 GTX part is about five people, myself included.[2]
I was kinda ignoring the suspension issue, mostly because I'm cheap and it handles well enough (tiny wheelbase, 4wd, and good rubber goes an awfully long way). But after multiple painful bottoming-out incidents on the back roads, and with everything being vague on those roads at very high speed, and seeing these selling for about £200 less than I had last seem them sold...this had to be done. It's overdue.
I'll update when they are here and fitted. I suspect this is going to be a massive improvement; you'll probably get a review out of this.
Aside: yeah I've done this one before, but what is the deal with shipping from the United States? I did notice that these were available from the US, for significantly less money, and I might have been tempted to save a few quid by waiting roughly six years for these to make their way across the Atlantic. And then I looked at the shipping costs:
OK, so this one was a bit of an outlier, but all of the coilovers that came up in my searches (only one of which was actually for my car) had shipping costs not far off £200. It's so strange.
[1] Fun fact: I'm told that D2 and K-Sport are made in the same factory, branded differently for different national markets.
[2] And I know that one of those people already has K-Sport coilovers fitted...
So I found an original owner's manual for the BF-generation Mazda 323 on eBay! £5.48 with shipping. I'm quite happy with that.
I bought it because of poor impulse control I wanted to find out what one of my warning lights meant; it's the light that looks like a headlight, but it has the word "STOP" written underneath it. Turns out that the manual doesn't explain that. Oh well, this is a nice addition to the glovebox anyway. I do like its minimalist cover design very much. :)
(Edit: a BF-owning friend informs me that this is the warning light for a brake light not working. That makes sense. After all, with my exciting "no alternator belt" episode, it's likely that the brake lights weren't working...)
It was only £7.50 on eBay. It'd be rude not to.
I do believe I need a "grips like a limpet" sticker now.
Lockdown is awful, but on the upside, it is giving me a chance to do all those jobs I haven't had time to do otherwise. Several of those jobs are to sort out all the minor electrical problems, figuring out the intermittent starting fault, sorting out the horn, fixing the sticky centre-diff lock switch. Let's get started!
Just kidding, I didn't get any of those done today. But I did buy a cool steering wheel! 🎉
This is a Driftworks Basics 350mm leather steering wheel. It costs a mere £55 as I write this _(2021 update: It's now £80, which I still think is very cheap). You'll need a boss to adapt it to your steering column, which costs somewhat more. This MOMO one works fine for my GTX. I had to do some minor modifications to the horn push (trimming off some protruding plastic) to make it fit into the boss. At half the price of an equivalent Sparco or OMP wheel: I'll live.
Driftworks are willing to put their name on this wheel, so I expected it to be good. It is. It feels nice, it feels solid, and the deep dish is comforting and looks cool. This is a bargain, especially as this costs just a few more quid (in absolute terms) than dangerous wish.com tat.
Here's my old steering wheel:
It doesn't actually have to look quite this bad. I have the original horn push. But the horn push is missing its badge, and I am unlikely to find another one. Also, the horn push once had the hilarious habit of randomly sounding the horn, usually at 3am, and I'm not sure I will ever trust it again.
This looks way cooler, especially with one of the free Driftworks stickers they threw in, and the simple design and deep dish doesn't look at all out of place with the 80s interior:
I know I know, the rest of the interior looks like a dump. It'll continue to look like a dump until I'm mostly done with the rest of the car; there's not a huge amount of point cleaning up in there until I know I'm not going to be in and out of it for any reasons other than driving it.
Onwards!
